More Silly Doodles

Silly art is often my favorite art.  Two forced perspective doodles I made recently.

A combination of a series of post-it notes fading away into the background and then one that is actually closer to the camera.  


The desk ship pops up nicely at the correct angle but is oddly skewed when viewed straight on.

More Doodles in 3D

Another version of forced perspective doodling and creating 3D effects.  This time with actual 3D!
For my other 3D doodles, click here

drawing 3D in 2D

 http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/06/3d-illusion-sketchbook-drawings-by-nagai-hideyuki/

Saw this on This Is Colossal and wanted to try it out.  So far have just done a couple quick doodles, but it's really fun!

Here you can see I have done two doodles in slightly different planes, so when one looks 'right' the other is slightly skewed.  The bricks in the wall are drawn normally, because the plane of the paper is the right plane for the wall, so the skewing occurs on its own!

If you use the side of the vertical side of the paper as a wall, you can just draw normally on it, and it will skew itself properly.  If anything protrudes from the wall, however, it has to be skewed in the drawing to look correct.  The fire hydrant top is very skewed if you look at it from straight on because it is drawn to look as if it is in front of the vertical plane of paper.  On the right is looking at the paper from the other side, to show how odd the paper looks if you don't have just the right angle.  It is quite frustrating to draw these without any sort of form to keep the paper bent properly, I need to find a good cardboard box or something to make a bent easel.

For another way to draw 3D in 2D, click here

Pirates and Dinosaurs

There are dinosaurs at the zoo and pirates at the science museum, so I drew these. 

Shelob's Meninges

Dinosaurs and Dragons: pencil sketches

Pencil sketches with extreme contrast!

Merry Llama

Horse Limb Bones

The past few days I've been trying to learn how to draw horses.  Horses are not easy to draw, so I've been spending some quality time doodling in my notebooks (an example is below).  Frequently I have annotated these doodles with notes on what is incorrect (I often don't make my horses long enough).  Horses (and other hoofed animals) have an odd bone structure that makes their legs a little less than intuitive when drawing.  Essentially they have one extra major joint, which occurs because their hooves are like the tips of their fingers, and their 'wrist' is what appears to be their front knee (also odd is that they have knees below their elbows). 

To show what's going on inside, I drew a horse with the bone structure showing through the skin (bones not quite to scale).  The horse limbs have 5 big zig-zags compared to the 4 in humans.

Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy

These are some sketches I did for my Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy class a few years ago. On the left is an anatomical cat skull, and on the right an anatomical lizard skull.  I want to make a series of ink drawings of a variety of vertebrate skulls, so hopefully that will be coming sometime soon.  These drawings were made for studying, so I had to balance realism, universality (in case we were tested on a skull not quite exactly like the one we practiced with) and simplicity (to easily distinguish the different bones of each skull).  I also had to, you know, have time left over to study them.  It was super fun.

Portland: City of Roses

This past week I was in Portland, where roses are incredibly abundant.  The International Rose Garden was particularly rosy.  They have excellent hydrangeas everywhere as well, and lots of blooming trees that don't grow in MN.  So of course it led to some pictures and a doodle on a restaurant paper place-mat.